


Canon Convergence: Mistaken Confrontation

by Aquelon



Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Minecraft Fallout - Newscapepro, The Crafting Dead
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Convergence, Gen, charlie this is for you for giving me all that good content, dimensional shenanigans, everything about this has a canonical reason for happening trust me, not necessarily a reasonable canonical reason but NONETHELESS, think of this like a teaser of a teaser of something that I'll hopefully write someday!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-22
Updated: 2019-05-22
Packaged: 2020-03-09 10:13:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18914878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aquelon/pseuds/Aquelon
Summary: Cory’s vision snaps back into clarity from whatever weird blurry mess it had been moments before, and he’s leaning on the side of a couch.  That’s unexpected, since before everything got kind of weird he was nowhere near a couch, instead exploring through the wasteland with Uni, who now is nowhere to be seen.  He looks around.~~~At this time of day and with this much weird stuff happening, Nick would rather go back to bed.  But he can’t, because of all the weird stuff.  Nick definitely wasn’t in a weird trailer ten minutes ago.  None of this makes sense.~~~Something is wrong?





	Canon Convergence: Mistaken Confrontation

**Author's Note:**

> Have questions? Ask me!  
> Want answers? I make no guarantees but you'll probably get some.  
> This won't be the first scene but it is an early scene in a fanfiction idea that's been bubbling in my head for a while.

Cory’s vision snaps back into clarity from whatever weird blurry mess it had been moments before, and he’s leaning on the side of a couch.  That’s unexpected, since before everything got kind of weird he was nowhere near a couch, instead exploring through the wasteland with Uni, who now is nowhere to be seen.  He looks around.

He’s in some abandoned trailer.  The couch, facing the closed door of the trailer, is green and somewhat moth-eaten, but even it and the pastel curtains, fluttering nearly shut, don’t look old enough to be pre-fallout.  A medium-sized rug with a picture of a cat on it fits between the door and the couch.  There’s a fireplace behind him, and his Remington is on the ground beside him.  Beyond the other armrest of the couch is a door to a bedroom or bathroom and a small kitchenette, with an unusual array of things on the counters-- a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses, a pistol, a shoe that wouldn’t look out of place in medieval times, a dented can of peaches.  A hole in the ceiling above the counter shows a mass of pale grey clouds that could be almost any weather.  Leaning on the wall next to the kitchenette and also trying to get his bearings is a familiar face: Nick.

He looks… different, somehow.  A bit more sunburned, but that wouldn’t be surprising.  Instead of the sun-bleached jacket, jeans, and goggles he usually wears, he has on a black-and-maroon baseball tee and a long red scarf.

It takes Cory a split second to realize, but his eyes are different than they should be.  Instead of one green and one yellow, they’re both green, and a slightly darker shade than he would have expected.

As Cory makes that realization, Nick makes eye contact (or whatever you call it when one of the involved parties technically doesn’t have eyes) with him, evidently realizes something, and recoils.  Then he fumbles a hand along the counter, not fully taking his eyes off Cory for more than a second, and grabs the pistol.  He looks… confused, scared, angry… and he points the pistol at Cory with a tremble in his hands.

Nick’s voice also sounds just different enough to be off-putting, and less accusatory than the words in it are trying to be: “How are you alive?”

“Uh,” Cory says, mind racing trying to figure out what could be going on, “what?”  The utter weirdness of the situation is giving him a slight sense of deja vu…

Of course.  In the weird cave town that he’d at one point been stuck in, there had been robotic recreations of people, called synths.  One of them had looked like Nick but acted distinctly different.

“The last time I saw you,” Nick says, voice starting to shake with emotions that don’t bode well for Cory’s chance of friendship with this guy, “you were-- you-- you--”

He hadn’t known at the time, but synth Nick’s eyes had been off too.  Not in the same way that this person’s eyes are, but even still.  Since there is currently a pistol being pointed at his face, he grabs the Remington and points it, not at Nick’s face but in his general direction.

“Look,” he tells Nick, “I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”  Then, deciding that there’s no point in subtleties with as many guns present as there are and with Nick’s stress being almost contagious, he adds: “Are you some kinda synth?”

“A what?” says Nick, voice rising.  Cory doesn’t know how to answer that question, and before he can think of something to say, Nick continues.  “Did you get, I don’t know!, brought back to life by--”

Nick is interrupted by the faintest rush of air and a flash of light.  Both of them glance over to where it came from, and immediately do a double take.

~~~

At this time of day and with this much weird stuff happening, Nick would rather go back to bed.  But he can’t, because of all the weird stuff.

Cory, apparently, is alive and also a couch length away from him, wearing some sort of blue, jumpsuit-like uniform rather than the army camo Nick would’ve expected, with somewhat longer hair, and as confused as Nick is.  While he hasn’t tried to kill or sell out Nick yet, it has been less than five minutes.

Also, Nick definitely wasn’t in a weird trailer ten minutes ago.  None of this makes sense.

He’s trying to think of some reasonable reason for any part of this to have happened when the air, just subtly, rushes away from the doorway of the trailer and there’s a flash of golden, prismatic light.  He and Cory both turn to look.

He drops the pistol.

There are three people standing on the cat-patterned rug.  On the right is a young woman in a yellow dress with a belt.  She has golden-brown hair and wolf ears, and looks like she’s just gone through something stressful.  On the left is a man wearing some sort of ornate red-and black armour.  He has dark hair and an ominous red glow over his eyes that makes the veins in his face look darker than they should, and he looks sort of pissed.

Nick doesn’t have time to wonder about their respective eccentricities.  The very existence of the third new arrival makes that extremely clear.

The person in the middle of that little group has a picture-perfect resemblance to Dr. Ross, except without the blood-soaked lab coat and with some small but noteworthy other differences.  He’s glowing and also levitating, leaving a faint distortion in the air behind him: a rainbow tint, like the door of the trailer is a beam of light travelling through a prism.  His eyes are the colour Nick would imagine molten gold would look like, without sclera or pupils, and they burn like it too.  But other than that, he looks exactly like the doctor that was responsible for the zombie apocalypse in the first place.

Needless to say, the differences don’t make the situation any less weird.

The man in the red armour speaks up with a snarl, almost glaring at Ross:  “Why the fuc--”

Ross interrupts him, with a voice softer, deeper, and more serious than Nick was expecting.  **_“I neglected to calculate for exertion, and travelling anywhere requires travelling everywhere now.  This will continue for a few hours.”_ **

Although Nick doesn’t look away from the levitating presumably-scientist fully, he still sees Cory shift his gun to point at Ross (the woman in the yellow dress squeaks with alarm at that) before he says, “What’s going o--”

**_“First of all,”_ ** Ross interrupts again,  **_“I am neither of the Rosses that you are thinking of, and I apologize for the suffering they caused you.  Second, both of your guesses are completely wrong.  You both know you are what you say you are; you can believe the other in that too.  However, third,”_ **

Nick’s not sure if Ross is starting to vibrate or if it’s just that he’s shaking.

Ross continues.   **_“that is not the person you should worry about having returned from the dead.”_ **  He pauses for half a second, long enough for the woman in the yellow dress to make some kind of expression, and then adds,  **_“And neither of those guns are loaded.”_ **

Before Nick or Cory can respond to any of that, Ross vanishes in another flash of light, taking wolf ears lady and red glow dude with him.

“What the fuck?” Cory says, then, “You okay?”

“Not really,” Nick says.  “I still don’t trust you, but I don’t know what’s going on, so truce?”

“Sure,” Cory says.  He checks his gun.  “It’s not loaded!  That mercenary was right about that, somehow!”

“Mercenary…?”  Nick decides not to look into that right now.  He starts looking around the trailer; picks up a dented can of peaches from the counter.  It’s closed but sounds half-empty.  “Everything about that was really weird.”  As he looks back past Cory, he notices a chip bag for a brand he doesn’t recognize on the mantle of the fireplace.

Wait.

“Why is there a fireplace in a trailer?” he wonders aloud.

“What?”  Cory turns to look at it.  “Wait, what?”  He makes his way over to the curtains covering the windows, fluttering from some unknown source, and pulls them open and looks through.  There’s a moment of silence as he takes it in; then he says, sounding vaguely confused, “You have to see this.”

Nick looks out the other window.

The landscape out there is mostly empty of buildings, but not the boring kind of emptiness that might be expected.  The ground looks like it’s just been through an earthquake or seven, buckled up at odd angles, with paving stones giving way to wood flooring giving way to medieval-style cobbles giving way to fresh asphalt giving way to trodden dirt, and rocks of an astounding array of types, and grass that looks very dead, and a puff of something that looks like it’s made of marshmallows, and a protrusion of meaty-looking red material that is on fire.  One of the few buildings that are present looks like Nick would expect, dilapidated from being empty for over a year; the others look like they’ve been falling apart for centuries or are shining new or are from some simple village or some space-age future.

The sky… from the sliver Nick could see from inside, he expected it to be a pale, cloudy grey, and sure, there’s a streak of that.  Some of it is a radiant blue, some a sickly yellow-green, some a washed-out blue, some a vibrant pink, some dark and empty, some tinted red, some black with storm clouds or white with fluffy ones, and it’s all very slowly blending together into a weird gross not-quite-purplish mess.  Nick can’t look away.

“What is happening?” he almost whispers, watching a drifting cloud be illuminated from the sky behind it.  It lights up sunset orange, then radiation green, then apparently disappears as it passes over a red section of the sky.

“I don’t know,” Cory says, bubbling with some sort of determination, “but I know I want to find out!”

Nick thinks about it for just a moment, weighing fear against… a deep curiosity.  “Alright, I’m in for that.  Let’s go.”


End file.
